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Tag Archives: Anne Rice

(This was originally posted on The Dinner Party Show’s Facebook page, and on iTunes. I actually blocked their page because I didn’t want to hear any snide comments from Christopher or the loyal gang of Party People. Despite the fact that Christopher and Eric would prefer that everyone who has something contrary to say [apart from themselves, of course] be taken to court and thrown in jail for saying it, I actually don’t care what they think of my review. It’s based on listening to their show for something like three years, and finally getting most of my thoughts about it out.)

Not that it matters, but here’s my review of The Dinner Party Show.

I left the Dinner Party Show a while ago because I began to get annoyed at the insane level of self-promotion and first world problems discussed on the show. I came back recently, and have laughed my ass off having a good time listening to the show.

At first, I was aggravated by the INSANE level of self-promotion. In one hour of The Dinner Party Show with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, we hear about how it’s The Dinner Party Show with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn about fifty times, from Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, hosts of the Dinner Party Show, with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn. I got further aggravated when Christopher and Eric started to blatantly talk about writing as a job and a marketing opportunity, and throwing the aspect of self-expression and the creation of art under the bus. It was cringe-worthy watching Christopher try and understand the concept of M/M or what a fanfic is show after show, as he interviewed self-published authors who write one-thousand word blog-post-length novellas and then charge fans for them, releasing them on a month by month basis and writing unoriginal ripoffs of concepts that were much better done by Anne Rice.

Then it was the quality of the interviews. There were fantastic guests like Alec Mapa, Dan Savage, Kristen Johnston, Patricia Nell Warren, and others, who all brought something valuable to the table. But at a certain point, Christopher and Eric began cow-towing to their guests so hard that you can hear the incinserity dripping from their voices as they speak constantly like they’re ad executives just DESPERATE to get you to buy products (through the Dinner Party Show dot com, by the way! That Dinner Party Show, the one with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn. Have we said that enough times yet?)

Ultimately, it was Christopher’s narcissism that just pushed me overboard and made me quit the show, but I came back because I really did miss the good humour and communal aspect of the show. And I always loved Eric, he served as a perfect foil to Christopher’s endless self-promotion. But I finally lost it when I was browsing through episodes I missed and heard Eric’s not-report about Monica Lewinsky, who went on a speaking tour talking about her experiences being the most laughed at person in the world, whose entire identity is that of being a public punching bag, and who had the gall to call the “Presidential Cocksucker” instead of listening to the message she was trying to impart about bullying. This from people who spend the majority of their show bullying anyone whose opinions they don’t agree with.

I was genuinely never offended at ANY of the episodes of The Dinner Party Show I listened to until that Monica Lewinsky comment. There’s a difference between “everybody gets served,” and undermining the importance of anti-bullying that they were happy to express when your guest (and cash cows) Dan Savage or Chaz Bono were at the table, but when that wasn’t the case, they were happy to hop back on the bullying train.

Nobody’s perfect, and honestly, I know that Eric doesn’t care enough about reviews to bother reading mine, and that’s fine. I’ll probably still buy that Jonathan and David novel, and love it. But the Dinner Party Show began as a genuine creative enterprise and then slowly morphed into a vanity project so steeped in self-promotion and narcissism that it’s virtually become an hour a week of dinner-chimes, the words “Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn” and the name “Dinner Party Show” repeated a hundred times per episode, and two authors so DESPERATE to be relevant that they will sell out whatever principles they have about the creation of art to try and get popularity (see: the four hundred something episodes with Bryan Fuller where Chris and Eric beg for relevance from the Fannibals).

It’s been a fun ride, guys. I really was with you since the first show, and I really and truly loved TDPS. I have listened to HOURS upon HOURS of the show, probably binge-listened to the first hundred ten times each. My comments, voicemails and such have been featured on the show, and I even got to have the wonderful experience of hearing Kristen Johnston call me sweet or just say my name out loud. But what began as perhaps the last bastion for the radio play format (TDPS is one of only TWO podcasts I know of on the whole internet that actually do the art of the radio play, and do it well), and a genuine look into topics that mattered, has become an endless tour of self-promotion for the writers of 1,001 Dark Nights, Bryan Fuller, and Christopher Rice. Eric I can forgive, at least he had the decency to come from a small town and become successful based on his own merit, and not being born the child of a celebrity. But at a certain point, the amount of pretentious and arrogant self-promotion becomes so transparent that it’s impossible to look past, even for the great laughs, and the (mostly) wonderful guests.

It was a fun party, but like parties tend to do, it got out of hand, and it was time to leave before someone got hurt or the police were called in.

A question was posted in a reading group about Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, asking if the sexual activity between people of all different genders was unsettling to anyone, or if anyone found it to be exciting. The following is my response, which I feel kind of sums up my whole feeling on the Beauty series:

I’m the gayest person I’ve ever met and I thought everything involving vaginal intercourse was sexy as hell in those books, primarily because I felt as though I was in the body of Beauty when her body was being discussed. So even though I don’t enjoy sex with women in real life, and even though I don’t want to be tied up over a trash bin and have my balls covered with honey so that flies can gather around them, it’s certainly exciting to read about and imagine the way those characters feel.

The Beauty books are always a bit of a double-edged sword for me. On the one hand there is immense sexual pleasure, and on the other hand, bondage and BDSM, especially taken to the extremes it’s taken to in the Beauty series, can be very frightening because as Anne has said herself, it’s a rape fantasy, and obviously being coerced and raped is not always an enjoyable thing to imagine, even with the context of a fantasy kingdom where the slaves’ pleasure is the main focus.

There’s always a psychological element to what’s really happening: are we talking about a slave being tied down and forced to have sex, or are we really talking about what it is to be a “prince,” the master of your own world, and be brought to kneel before reality, or “the kingdom,” and to submit to it, or to choose not to submit. Are the masters and mistresses really sexual objects, or are they representative of sex as a whole, and it’s effect on the psyche, or is the entire series one long examination of the loss virginity, both sexually and emotionally, to the world?

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 18th and runs through Sunday, August 24th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 11 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

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My Goals

1. Read at least 2 books this week

2. Read a book from the very beginning to the very end.

3. Spend at least an hour reading every day.

NEW GOAL! Read at least once a day, for any period of time

4. Write update posts as I go along.

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Despite not having posted yesterday or today intil now at nearly three in the morning, I have been participating in the bout of books! It turned out that a lot was going on yesterday, so I only got the chance to read for about twenty minutes before bed, but I put in an hour or so today, and I’ve decided to amend my rules a bit. I was going to being with Eric Shaw Quinn’s book Say Uncle, which I do still plan to read, but quite simply, the battery on my Kindle is dead and I just haven’t plugged it up to charge yet, so I decided to read something physical, and since I’ve only read two pages of Emma by Jane Austen, I thought I’d pick that up. Turns out I was really not in the mood for upper-middle-class-turn-of-the-century-English-match-making last night, so I picked up The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice, a book I read about half of last year and then just kind of forgot about for a while. It wasn’t necessarily boring, it was just taking a very long time to build up to anything exciting, and some of Anne’s little writing quirks made me roll my eyes a bit. Still, I picked it back up and I’m actually having a fun time reading it! So, I have amended my rules above, and here is my progress so far for the week:

Monday, August 18, 2014

1. Reading: The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

2. Time Spent: About 20 minutes or so

3. Pages read: 14 Pages

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

1. Reading: The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

2. Time Spent: About an hour

3. Pages read: 28 Pages

I’m enjoying myself with this book, I pretty much picked up right where I left off and only needed to be reminded of a few details. The Wolf Gift is a good story with Anne’s normal fluid, poetic style of prose and very compelling dialogue, but I do have a few qualms with this book. The first is that it seems to me that Anne wrote herself into this book as several different middle-aged, successful women who get to sleep with the hunky twenty-something main character. He meets and makes passionate love with two different women who are a little bit higher on the age spectrum than he is, and both women are intellectuals who want to talk about art and life and philosophy and nature. The first is very flirtatious, while the second is a divorced woman who had a bad marriage and lives alone amongst the California redwoods, so it’s not like I’m saying these characters are exactly Anne Rice incarnate, but it does feel a bit like she may have written herself into these women and allowed herself to sleep with the charming and sexy young reporter who speaks like a seventeenth century vampire, even when using an iPhone. Hell, the book even opens with the protagonist writing a piece for the newspaper about a beautiful well-furnished house for sale, and Anne Rice has had a public listing for a beautiful well-furnished house for sale up on the front page of her website for years. It’s just a thought, that’s all.

My other big problem here is that there are some sections where Anne just begins regurgitating her research onto the page without any finesse. A character will go on a three paragraph explanation of just what a wolf bite does to you, another character will go through an extensive list of all the influential werewolf fiction published in the last two hundred years, and another character will go into unnecessary detail describing things we don’t really need to know about as readers. These extra details aren’t immersive, they feel flat and insincere, and it seems to me that she just had all of this werewolf research she’d done and needed to do something with, so rather than working it somehow into the plot in a compelling way, she just has her characters list it out a long string of mildly interesting, somewhat related facts that may or may not have to do with what’s happening.

I have a couple of other nitpicky issues too, some of which other readers have already addressed: Reuben speaks like Lestat, and it’s just not very believable coming from the mouth of someone who was presumably born in the late eighties, no matter how educated and dashing he is. People do not stage whisper “Dear God!” whenever they find something shocking unless they’re Frasier Crane. I also find the gratuitous use of the word “iPhone” to be aggravating. “Reuben checked his iPhone,” “His iPhone buzzed,” “He knew she’d have her iPhone on her this time of day,” “He carefully worked the touch screen on the iPhone with his paws,” etc. etc. Then there’s the monster sex… I mean, I get that he’s a man-wolf, so he’s still anatomically a man, just a big hairy one with a snout, but still, it’s just not really all that sexy, and this is a woman who knows how to do sexy, to a disturbing degree even, she did write the Sleeping Beauty books for gods sake.

Despite all of that, though, it’s still in an involving and interesting read, and right now about 3/4 of the way through the book, some interesting stuff has finally started happening! So we’ll see how it goes. At any rate, I wouldn’t still be reading it if I didn’t like it, and I’m a huge Anne Rice fan, so I really mean no disrespect to her, I just find some of the things she does to try and seem present and modern are a little cringe-worthy, and it seems like she’s trying a little too hard. But we’ll see.

The fifth book in the Vampire Chronicles was slow to start, but once it picked up, it was impossible to put down. To be honest, Lestat doesn’t even play the major role in this book, the title character of Memnoch does.

Lestat spends the first few chapters stalking a victim named Roger, and then spends a very long time listening to Roger’s life story, which somehow feels extraneous and doesn’t provide much payoff for the reader, as Roger is a ghost, and the side-plots about a series of books by a man named Wynken De Wilde and the story of Roger’s turbulent childhood and life of crime never develop into anything other than an introduction of his daughter.

Throughout the opening of the story, Lestat is being stalked by a creature that eventually reveals himself to be the devil, and is in fact the same devil that David Talbot saw in a vision, revealed back in Tale of the Body Thief. He asks Lestat to come and be his assistant and his partner, and it’s then that the story really begins.

This book is an explanation of the underlying mythology of the Vampire Chronicles, down to the very center: it explains the creation of the universe. Memnoch explains in fascinating detail the history of God and the angels, the creation and evolution of the universe, his personal story of being cast out of Heaven, his reaction to his beloved God becoming Christ, his revulsion at the tormented spirits of the Earth who cannot enter Heaven, and the ultimate truth that though he opposes God, he ultimately wishes to praise, serve and love God in a way different than God himself would choose, and allow all the spirits of the dead to experience the joy of Heaven and the warmth and light of God.

Memnoch’s adventure makes up the bulk of the story, and once it begins, the other details of the book are forgotten, and Lestat simply becomes an outsider listening to Memnoch’s fascinating tale. In the end, we’re left wondering how much of it was real or not, it’s implied that Memnoch may have genuinely been the devil or he may simply have been some other entity, and like in all spiritual matters, things are left open-ended and up to interpretation. The ending of the book sees Lestat finding himself at peace in his home, ready to fade away and end the Vampire Chronicles, though we all know that it was not at all the ending, but perhaps the ending of the first era.

Ultimately, I left Memnoch the Devil satisfied, but a little annoyed at how little Lestat’s story really had to do with the Memnoch’s, as much of Lestat’s narrative became inconsequential. As with all the other chronicles so far, Lestat had his meetup with Louis, with the normal observations about how beautiful he is and how much Lestat loves him, and David’s character is expanded to show that he now has some history with Armand, however Memnoch is the star here, and while Lestat’s story is interesting, there’s not really a lot of payoff for reading it.

Still, Rice’s extremely interesting take on Biblical history (from back in her atheist days, when he was looking at the Catholic spirituality as an outsider) is not to be missed, and I would recommend this book even to people who have never read any of the Vampire Chronicles, simply for Memnoch’s extremely interesting tale, weaving together the classic Christian narrative with new ideas, and actually showing the classic devil as a sympathetic character while questioning the motivations and stubborn childlike attitude of God.